Miscellaneous

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From time to time I get requests for copies of the rules to my boardgames. It seems to be widely believed that in return for my having earned 25 cents in royalties when a copy was bought 35 years ago, I am obliged to offer such support indefinitely. I say this because these requests are never accompanied by a donation, and are never resubmitted when I ask for one.

I will be happy to send photocopied rules for a donation of $10 or more. I do not have the rules in digital format, and I have asked Boardgamegeek and other sites not to post such files, in order to protect my intellectual property rights. Sorry, I cannot supply any other components or lists of components.

A simulation of a card game pitting you against three AI players, based on a design by Marcel-André Casasola Merkle.
The theme is a struggle for control of a Renaissance city. Although it's easy for you to be put out of the running just by turn order,
the system has surprising depth.

For Windows with .NET Framework. There's no setup file; just run Turncoat.exe from the extracted folder.

Jotto is a traditional word-guessing game more akin to code-breaking games such as Mastermind
than to the comparatively simple-minded Hangman. You guess a five-letter word and the computer tells you how many
letters are matches—but not which ones. A real brain-teaser.

This version chooses from over 2,900 words and also checks your guesses against its wordlist.

The Animal Game, also known as Shou Qi
or the Jungle Game, is a traditional Chinese board game similar
to Stratego. Each player has a team of eight animals that move
around the board and capture smaller animals. The object is to
get one animal into your opponent's den. In this version, you
play against the computer. A very enjoyable strategy game for
children as young as 5, and even adults will find it challenging
on the higher skill levels.

A simple, fast-paced dungeon crawl based on the author's popular card game, once called “the
best game since Diplomacy.” You form an exploring party and
enter a six-level cave full of treasures, creatures, and traps.
Try to make friends, defeat enemies, and steal as much booty as
you can carry. The game can be played in less than half an hour
and is equally enjoyable for children and adults.

The game has 35 types of characters,
treasures, and magical artifacts and allows you to set the size
of the Cave and the occurrence of stairs.

Skookum
means “mighty” or “excellent.” It is one of
the few surviving words from Chinook, a trade
language or pidgin spoken on the coast of British Columbia and
the American Northwest till about the 1920s. Chinook borrowed
words from English, French, and various indigenous languages.
Skookum was originally a Salish word for a demon or monster, hence
something “awesome.”

Some other Chinook words still in occasional
use:

chuck
— water, as in Skookumchuck, a place of strong tidal currents
or rapids; saltchuck, the sea

muckamuck
— a person of great importance, a bigshot

tyee — chief. A name for the salmon also known as chinook, spring, and king (or, according to some, a specimen of this fish weighing 30 lb. or more).

Here are the rants about noise that I wrote when I was involved with the Right to Quiet Society. I pretty much gave up the struggle after realizing that almost no one else cared, but I still believe in what I wrote. And things have gotten worse, not better—especially on television, which is so jarring as to be largely unwatchable.

In recent years Canadians have started to become aware of the damage being done to civil liberties by the kangaroo courts set up by federal and provincial governments in the name of “human rights.” I like to think I was 25 years ahead of the times when I wrote this letter to the long-defunct contrarian periodical The Idler.

I recently came across this article on the mysteries of programming graphics on the old Kaypro CP/M computers. I had forgotten I wrote it, and it's only of historical interest now, but it is probably the most complete documentation of the subject in existence.

Learn more about my board games at boardgamegeek.com. (Yes,
in a former life I was known as Terence Donnelly.) And read here about the development of Sorcerer's Cave and Mystic Wood.